WOMEN AND FILM

Reputed to be the first feminist film journal (at least in the USA), this journal was launched by Siew-Hwa Beh and Saundra Salyer , who were grad students from UCLA and San Francisco State University respectively. Their first issue was published in 1972 (before Laura Mulvey’s ground-breaking intervention), and they asked Beverle Houston and me to contribute pieces. So we published two essays in their next two issues before the journal ended in 1976.

“Woman and Manchild in the Land of Broken Promise,” Women & Film 3-4 (1973).

We were writing a number of feminist film essays around that time and publishing them in a range of journals— “Truffaut’s Gorgeous Killers” in Film Quarterly (Winter 1973/74), “Madwomen in the Movies” in Film Heritage (Winter 1974), and “The Night Porter as Daydream” in Literature/Film Quarterly (Fall 1975). In fact, all of our writings were feminist, but Women & Film was the only explicitly feminist journal in which they appeared.

Since the editors of Women & Film operated as a collective, they asked us if we wanted to write with them as part of the group. But we were already committed to our own collaboration and wanted to keep publishing in a wide range of journals. Still we promoted Women & Film to our students and colleagues and assigned it in our classes.